Good Read Aloud Detective Fiction for ESL
Discover the best detective fiction books perfect for ESL learners to read aloud. Enhance language skills with engaging mysteries tailored for easy listening and comprehension.
Book
Forty Words for Sorrow
by Giles Blunt
The discovery of the body of a supposed thirteen-year-old runaway and the disappearance of another youngster in the rural town of Algonquin Bay force local cops John Cardinal and his new partner, Lisa Delorme, into a desperate search for a possible serial killer. By the author of Cold Eye. Reprint.
Book
The Shape of Water
by Andrea Camilleri
Follows Sicilian detective Inspector Montalbano as he investigates the suspicious death of an engineer who had made a name for himself in a small town.
Book
Dead Lagoon
by Michael Dibdin
Among the emerging generation of crime writers, none is as stylish and intelligent as Michael Dibdin, who, in Dead Lagoon, gives us a deliciously creepy new novel featuring the urbane and skeptical Aurelio Zen, a detective whose unenviable task it is to combat crime in a country where today's superiors may be tomorrow's defendants.Zen returns to his native Venice. He is searching for the ghostly tormentors of a half-demented contessa and a vanished American millionaire whose family is paying Zen under the table to determine his whereabouts-dead or alive. But he keeps stumbling over corpses that are distressingly concrete: from the crooked cop found drowned in one of the city's noisome "black wells" to a brand-new skeleton that surfaces on the Isle of the Dead. The result is a mystery rich in character and deduction, and intensely informed about the history, politics, and manners of its Venetian setting.
Book
The Winter Queen
by Boris Akunin
This is the first book featuring Erast Fandorin, a gentleman sleuth who solves murders and mysteries in tsarist Russia.
Book
The Blind Man of Seville
by Robert Wilson
Investigating the brutal murder of an artist's son, the first of several victims, detective inspector Javier Falcn reads the artist's journals and learns several disturbing truths before realizing that he is the killer's next target. Reprint. 50,000 first printing.
Book
Gorky Park
by Martin Cruz Smith
"Brilliant...One of the best books of the season." ASSOCIATED PRESS A triple murder in a Moscow amusement center: three corpses found frozen in the snow, faces and fingers missing. Chief homicide investigator Arkady Renko is brilliant, sensitive, honest, and cynical about everything except his profession. To identify the victims and uncover the truth, he must battle the KGB, FBI, and New York police as he performs the impossible--and tries to stay alive doing it.
Book
The Talented Mr. Ripley
by Patricia Highsmith
A young man sent to Europe on a job slowly assumes the life of the man he is sent to help.
Book
In the Memory of the Forest
by Charles Powers
When the body of Tomek, a young distillery worker, is found brutally murdered in the forest outside Jadowia in Poland, his boyhood friend, Leszek, decides to uncover the mystery behind Tomek's death. Assuming the role of amateur sleuth, Leszek embarks on a clue-finding mission that takes him from country to city, into the grimy offices of once-powerful bureaucrats, and face-to-face with the Catholic Church's pious and impotent priests. And as Leszek moves closer to the truth, he is confronted with another strange mystery: the disappearance of stones from the foundations of the town's oldest houses. The further Leszek is drawn into this mystery, the deeper into the past he must search for answers about his people, the grim tragedy of the Holocaust, and ultimately, his own identity.In the Memory of the Forest is a haunting, evocative novel that explores the impact of a murder on a community, and of history and the fate of the Jews in Poland during World War II on a people.
Book
The Silence of the Lambs
by Thomas Harris
An ingenious, masterfully written novel, Thomas Harris's The Silence of the Lambs is a classic of suspense and storytelling and the basis for the Oscar award-winning horror film starring Jodie Foster as Clarice Starling and Anthony Hopkins as Dr. Hannibal Lecter. A serial murderer known only by a grotesquely apt nickname—Buffalo Bill—is stalking particular women. He has a purpose, but no one can fathom it, for the bodies are discovered in different states. Clarice Starling, a young trainee at the F.B.I. Academy, is surprised to be summoned by Jack Crawford, Chief of the Bureau's Behavioral Science section. Her assignment: to interview Dr. Hannibal Lecter, a brilliant psychiatrist and grisly killer now kept under close watch in the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Lecter's insight into the minds of murderers could help track and capture Buffalo Bill. Smart and attractive, Starling is shaken to find herself in a strange, intense relationship with the acutely perceptive Lecter. His cryptic clues—about Buffalo Bill and about her—launch Clarice on a search that every reader will find startling, harrowing, and totally compelling.
Book
Shutter Island
by Dennis Lehane
Summer, 1954. U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels has come to Shutter Island, home of Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Along with his partner, Chuck Aule, he sets out to find an escaped patient, a murderess named Rachel Solando, as a hurricane bears down upon them. But nothing at Ashecliffe Hospital is what it seems. And neither is Teddy Daniels. Is he there to find a missing patient? Or has he been sent to look into rumors of Ashecliffe’s radical approach to psychiatry? An approach that may include drug experimentation, hideous surgical trials, and lethal countermoves in the shadow war against Soviet brainwashing. . . . Or is there another, more personal reason why he has come there? As the investigation deepens, the questions only mount: How has a barefoot woman escaped the island from a locked room? Who is leaving clues in the form of cryptic codes? Why is there no record of a patient committed there just one year before? What really goes on in Ward C? Why is an empty lighthouse surrounded by an electrified fence and armed guards? The closer Teddy and Chuck get to the truth, the more elusive it becomes, and the more they begin to believe that they may never leave Shutter Island. Because someone is trying to drive them insane. . . .
Book
The Bone Collector
by Jeffery Deaver
Look who's back to chill readers to the bone... The first novel featuring Detective Lincoln Rhyme, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Stone Monkey.
Book
Monkeewrench
by P. J. Tracy
Haunted by a series of horrifying and violent episodes in their past, Grace McBride and the oddball crew of her software company, Monkeewrench, create a computer game where the killer is always caught, where the good guys always win. But their game becomes a nightmare when someone starts duplicating the fictional murders in real life, down to the last detail. By the time the police realize what's happening, three people are dead, and with seventeen more murder scenarios available online, there are seventeen more potential victims. While the authorities scramble to find the killer in a city paralyzed by fear, the Monkeewrench staff are playing their own game, analyzing victim profiles in a frantic attempt to discover the murderer's next target. In a thriller populated by characters both hilarious and heartbreaking, a rural Wisconsin sheriff, two Minneapolis police detectives, and Grace's gang are caught in a web of decades-old secrets that could get them all killed.
Book
The Treatment
by Mo Hayder
Detective Jack Caffery returns to investigate a brutal attack on a London couple and the mysterious disappearance of their young son, a crime that brings him face to face with nightmarish memories of his own past.
Book
The Parsifal Mosaic
by Robert Ludlum
Michael Havelock's world died on a moonlit beach on the Costa Brava. He watched as his partner and lover, Jenna Karats, double agent, was efficiently gunned down by his own agency. There was nothing left for him but to quit the game, get out. Until, in one frantic moment on a crowded railroad platform in Rome, Havelock saw his Jenna alive. From then on, he was marked for death by both U.S. and Russian assassins, racing around the globe after his beautiful betrayer, trapped in a massive mosaic of treachery created by a top-level mole with the world in his fist--Parsifal.
Book
The Day of the Jackal
by Frederick Forsyth
The Jackal. A tall, blond Englishman with opaque, gray eyes. A killer at the top of his profession. A man unknown to any secret service in the world. An assassin with a contract to kill the world's most heavily guarded man. One man with a rifle who can change the course of history. One man whose mission is so secretive not even his employers know his name. And as the minutes count down to the final act of execution, it seems that there is no power on earth that can stop the Jackal.
Book
Eye of the Needle
by Ken Follett
An enemy spy code named "The Needle" knows the vital secret of the Allies deception and holds the key to Nazi victory.
Book
Fruit of a Poisonous Tree
by Norm Harris
When a young Navy SEAL is savagely murdered in a Seattle alley, presumably by a Marine Corps war hero, Navy lawyer Faydra Green is ordered to investigate. Although this is her first homicide assignment, it does not take Faydra long to decide the accused man is innocent. Someone wants her investigation to quietly disappear, but Faydra is determined to clear the accused man's name, discover why she has been made an accessory to a cover up, and find out who is responsible. But she will need all her wits about her to unravel the intricate web of lies and deception that stand between her and the answers she seeks. Faydra's quest for the truth launches her on a heart-pounding voyage across the world in a desperate race against time. Along the way, she will contend with the murky backwaters of governmental dirty deals and international intrigue, follow every lead, and risk her life in a bid to halt a catastrophic conflict that has three nations on the brink of war.
Book
Scorpion
by Jack Stewart
DEA agent Bill Broxton is assigned to protect the Prime Minister of Trinidad from an assassin. He doesn't know that his fiancée is the killer.
Book
I'm Not Scared
by Niccolò Ammaniti
In the summer of 1978 in a small Italian village, nine-year-old Michele Amitrano loses his innocence of childhood when he accidentally uncovers a dark secret being kept by the adults of Acqua Traverse.
Book
The Snack Thief
by Andrea Camilleri
When an elderly man is stabbed to death in an elevator and a crewman on an Italian fishing trawler is machine-gunned by a Tunisian patrol boat off Sicily's coast, only Inspector Montalbano, with his keen insight into human nature, suspects the link between the two incidents. His investigation leads to the beautiful Karima, an impoverished housecleaner and occasional prostitute, whose young son steals other schoolchildren's midmorning snacks. But Karima disappears, and the young snack thief's life, as well as Montalbano's, is endangered when the inspector exposes a viper's nest of government corruption and international intrigue.
Book
Cosi Fan Tutti
by Michael Dibdin
An Aurelio Zen Novel Michael Dibdin's overburdened Italian police inspector has been transferred to Naples, where the rule of law is so lax that a police station may double as a brothel. But this time, having alienated superiors with his impolitic zealousness in every previous posting, Zen is determined not to make waves. Too bad an American sailor (who may be neither American nor a sailor) knifes one of his opposite numbers in Naples's harbor, and some local garbage collectors have taken to moonlighting in homicide. And when Zen becomes embroiled in a romantic intrigue involving love-sick gangsters and prostitutes who pass themselves off as Albanian refugees, all Naples comes to resemble the set of the Mozart opera of the same title. Bawdy, suspenseful, and splendidly farcical, the result is an irresistible offering from a maestro of mystery.
Book
Death from the Woods
by Brigitte Aubert
Named France's Best Thriller of 1997, "Death from the Woods" is one of the most acclaimed suspense novels to hit the world in years. In a suburb of Paris, a series of grisly murders has left residents shaken. A little girl says she knows who the killer is, but she has confided only in one person: Elise Andrioli, a blind, mute quadriplegic. She's defenseless and helpless. And she may very well be the next target.